iSonea will present its new asthma monitoring smartphone technology at the Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas this week.

The company will also demonstrate its WheezoMeter™ platform; the device allows asthma patients, their families, caregivers and physicians to monitor asthma symptoms on an on-going basis, according to the press release.

The conference and exhibition are “an ideal audience to demonstrate the benefits of our first smartphone application, which builds on our proprietary technology and is in line with our mission to develop future technologies enabling better patient outcomes,” said CEO Michael Thomas in the press release.

The Australia-based company will show its  first proprietary smartphone application, AsthmaSense™ at the exhibit. This application helps patients manage their asthma condition and symptoms. In Australia, slightly less than 20 percent of infants experience asthma, and in 2003, the last year statistics were available, the disease was the leading cause of illness in children.

According to the press release, Australia has one of the highest prevalence rates of asthma in the world. Worldwide, almost a quarter of a million people died of asthma in 2004.  Asthma affects over 300 million people across the world, according to the press release. And the costs are astronomical. Treatment of asthma costs the US alone $30 billion a year, according to the CDC.

Symptoms of asthma include wheezing, a tightness in the chest, an inability to breathe, and in worst cases, death, if not treated promptly.

Features of the first version of WheezoMeter, which is still being tested, “include a tracking system to monitor symptom trends, triggers, test results including peak flow measurements and WheezeRate™, as well as medication usage and adherence.”

iSonea also announced that it will roll out some of its asthma products over the next 24 months “after entering its first formal partnership with telecommunications company, Qualcomm (News - Alert) Life, for the development of a mobile asthma monitoring platform,” according to the press release.

The new technology pulls together “iSonea’s proprietary Acoustic Respiratory Monitoring (ARM (News - Alert)) ™ devices and mobile health asthma management systems with Qualcomm’s 2net™ platform,” according to the press release.

iSonea said in the press release that it will use Qualcomm's 2net plug-and-play Hub technology, which connects to cloud-based 2net Platform data servers, to collect and send patient health data from its asthma monitoring devices.

Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM (News - Alert) in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.